


In Dreams

by elmathelas



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Dreams, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 16:37:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elmathelas/pseuds/elmathelas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dominic has dreams about being able to fly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Livejournal 5/30/2004. Beta by Pippinmctaggart.

When Dominic was young, still in school, with only the thoughts and daydreams of becoming an actor the slightest hint of his future, he occasionally had the most wonderful dreams. In them the surroundings were the same as in his waking life; the kitchen, the hallway, the street just outside the house, yet there was also the realization of something only temporarily forgotten.

In his dreams it wasn’t a discovery, it was only a memory, and what he knew was this: Human beings can fly. Not high, not for long, but a big step and they’re airborne, a few feet off the ground, and if the right state of mind is employed a person can go very far, at a pleasingly fast speed, by a certain slight treading motion of the feet that both is and is not anything like walking.

In his dreams Dominic would remember that, and laugh quietly, wondering how he could have forgotten. The weightless feeling buoyed him, brought him an effervescence of spirit. As he traveled there was a light feeling beneath his ribs, a physical manifestation of happiness.

In dreams he flew to school, to the store, he floated down steps without touching them. There was an ease of being, as if, finally, he was living in the air with the same ease as a fish in water, finally accepting his body’s place within it. The question of gravity that kept his feet stuck to the ground with deliberation was gone.

He woke, more than once, happy and eager to begin the day, agog at the simple happiness that infused life when one could choose to float just above the ground.

“Dom, breakfast.” His mother’s voice was strained from having been up all night at the hospital where she worked. He threw back the covers, intending to share his discovery with her, or at least make sure she too knew, bounded out of bed, turned on the landing, took one giant step, and promptly fell down the stairs.

His mother, each time it happened, rushed to him, white in the face with fear that had nothing to do with her professional knowledge of what happened to falling bodies, and had everything to do with her own flesh and blood lying crumpled on the kitchen tile. Each time she sighed with relief and muttered a prayer of thanks when he sat up, then stood. The expression of pain that crossed his face was secondary only to an odd look of disappointment that she always chalked up to his embarrassment at falling at his age, and the confusion of sleep. After all, she reasoned, to remain so unhurt after such a fall, he must still have been asleep when he first began his descent.

 

Billy almost never dreamed, when he was a child, and when he did he knew that he was dreaming, the pictures and colors too bright and vivid by far to be anything but a product of his imagination. Even when dreamed of his parents they, too, were clearly fabrications. They were only illusions, and if he did not know them for lies when he saw them, he knew upon waking.

He reasoned, as an adult, that he slept too soundly to ever remember his dreams, and only occasionally wondered what beauties or horrors might have been visited upon him without his ever knowing of them.

When he started to dream in New Zealand, it was scenes and phrases that might have been ripped from life, only showing themselves to be fabrications when he attempted to reference them in the middle of the day. In broad daylight the words would die on his tongue and he would hope that no one would notice he had been about to speak of a memory that did not exist. When in New Zealand he did not dream of home or family or even beautiful women. He only dreamed of Dom.

His dreams were lit with a soft blue light that seemed to show things imperfectly, yet wholly. They always showed the same thing. When he glanced at Dom in his dreams, he remembered his one-time fascination with the Academy’s old copy of Gray’s Anatomy, remembered trying to memorize the names of each muscle and bone, because there was a kind of beauty in knowing. Only the dance students ever consulted it, for their papers on kinesiology, but he found himself drawn to the text, staring at the foundation of what a body was. When Dom looked at him, in dreams, there was no sight of anything but skin, but there was knowledge of more, as there had been knowledge of more with the diagrams and drawings in the old book. In dreams of Dom the more that was known was not under the skin, but beyond it. Still, upon waking, remembering the dream before he could remember it had been an illusion, Billy thought there was a kind of mystery about that kind of seeing, the same kind of mystery that had spoken to him when he’d turned the old pages of Gray’s. Waking and remembering that blue light brought to mind other mysterious memories-- whispering along a stone arch, fog in the morning, the sound of soft voices murmuring in Latin. The only Latin he knew was the names of what held him together, and it seemed to fit.

In Billy’s dreams Dom was always facing away from him in that blue light, then he would turn, would look at him. In dreams Dom was always on the verge of speech or a change of expression from solemnity to something else, but Billy would wake, or forget what came next upon waking. In the daytime he treasured Dom’s looks no more or less than any other person’s regard, but in dreams no one else populated that strange space.

The dreams became so common he knew he was dreaming, a disappointment, but he found he could stay in that place more easily. There was a warmth of feeling there, like a tiny sun under the flat bone of his chest and he thought of the proper word for the place he felt it—solar plexus—and the mystery of those words seemed to fit in with the blue light again.

Dom sat facing away from him, as always, more than an arm’s length away, and now, knowing it was only a dream, Billy had the time to walk forward, had time to reach, even as Dom turned his face towards him.

Dom smiled, and it was a relief to Billy, who hadn’t remembered his own dreams well enough to know what Dom would do.

In dreams, Billy thought, no reasons were necessary, no words, so there was no harm in touching without asking, no harm at all. Dom’s back, still turned towards him, practically begged for hands against skin, and Billy was only too pleased to comply. His dry fingertips traced over the planes of muscle between the shoulder blades, the trapezius spread all the way from the occipital process of the skull to the 12th dorsal vertebra, a triangle, a flap of a protecting cape, a strong wing that had somehow failed to develop the processes that would make flight a possibility.

Beneath the trapezius there was more, flat planes of muscle that held you up and made you move, and he traced over the path of where the rhomboideus minor would be, another wing shape hidden beneath others. He dragged the flat of his fingernails along, bumping them down over the lowest rib, describing parts that were never there. Had his fingers been dipped in ink, he would have been drawing feathers, drooping in rest now that Dom was merely sitting, face still slightly turned, head tilted courtesy of the sternocleidomastoid muscles, and Dom, he felt, would have been pleased with the decoration.

In sleep, in dreams, speech was not necessary. There was only blue light and Dom in a void, shirtless and willing to have invisible wings drawn on him while Billy silently recited the calming litany of foreign words that described the discreet regions of the body. In life speech was a constant, words tumbling around him in English so much, so often that occasionally they would fail to make sense for whole moments at a time. When Dom spoke Billy would listen, and the words would come through clearly again.

 

Billy stood in the middle of the trailer, frozen mid-movement with fatigue, the effort of changing into his street clothes having already taken most of the energy he had left after the day’s shooting. The undershirt he’d been wearing all day was all that was left of his costume, and it felt fairly soaked with dried sweat, ringed with make-up, clinging to his back where Pippin’s heavy wool coat had been pressing it down for hours. Summoning enough will power for one more thing he decided to peel it off, just wear a simple light shirt home, the short car ride still several minutes too many to continue wearing the foul thing. He closed his eyes when he pulled it over his head, but the yellow light from the setting sun still shone through his eyelids, and even with his eyes closed he knew Dom was restless, pacing behind him, ready to leave.

He reached for his shirt, froze when he felt Dom’s hands on his back, grasping his shoulders, really, a hand cupped over each acromion so that his fingers were brushing the very top of Billy’s chest, while he ran a thumb hard down the spine of each scapula.

“They say these are close to wings,” Dom said quietly, and when Billy opened his eyes the light in the trailer was almost enough to blind him. “I don’t see it, myself.” Then he was describing the width of the trapezius with his splayed fingertips, drawing invisible lines across each side, running them down the sides of Billy’s spine, down the vertebral aponeurosis. Billy nearly shivered but as soon as it was felt the cold turned to warmth, the tiny sun shining under his sternum, brighter and stronger than in dreams.

“You don’t?” He didn’t turn around.

“No.” Dom had reached up again, was grasping at the shoulder blades with his thumbs nearest the spine, as if he was attempting to shape wings out of Billy’s back, or see the shape where it was already so clear to begin with.

Billy closed his eyes. “Would you believe I once memorized the names of all those muscles?”

Billy kept his eyes closed when Dom let go of his shoulder blades. Dom put his arms around Billy’s shoulders and leaned forward, then stood normally, pulling Billy back to his chest when it became clear that Billy was the one who needed support.

“No problem believing that at all.” Dom’s voice was so near his ear yet Billy had the hardest time knowing if, when he opened his eyes, he’d be able to see Dom or not. “I used to have dreams that I could really fly. But not with wings. Just…” Dom paused, wondering how to say what came to mind. “I just could.”

Billy bit his tongue slightly. A swift pain zinged through his mouth. Awake, then. The tiny sun was melting in his chest, too warm to stay in one place, spreading. He wondered if his dreams had simply changed color, from blue to yellow, but then Dom’s slight beard was scratching his shoulder, imperfection, and of course there had already been speech, words that hardly made any sense at all. Not a dream then.

He opened his eyes and it seemed that the sun from his own body had escaped and colored the room in bright but dying light, and he saw nothing but a nimbus of white and yellow and orange, only barely aware that it was fading as the sun slipped below the horizon.

Dom’s revelation demanded a response, in the real world. Billy leaned back slightly and tried to find the words, now that he could speak past the warmth that had filled his thoracic cavity only moments earlier.

“Oh really?” It seemed the only thing to say.


End file.
